The “woman in a yellow dress surrounded by a charm of hummingbirds” awaiting her call to the pearly gates in “Jesus Alone” could very well be the one at the center of “Magneto,” whose quivering atmospherics and panting delivery suggest a goth Astral Weeks. Like one of those “Sopranos” episodes where Tony is trapped in his dreams, nothing makes sense on the surface, but every hallucinatory image and mysterious gesture is loaded with circuitous significance. “Rings of Saturn” is one of several tracks on Skeleton Tree where Cave sings about or through an enigmatic female character. And as surprising as it is to hear a dogged non-conformist like Cave embrace some au courant pop device, here it functions as a faded reminder of a more carefree time-like how, in our most helpless moments, a sentimental song can turn you into a mess. But Cave’s numbed, sing-speak delivery is laid bare above the smooth texture-not even a cooing chorus of millennial whoops can rouse him. By Bad Seeds’ standards, “Rings of Saturn” is practically a chillwave song, its dusty drum loop smothered in a soft-focus synth gauze. Not every song is infused with such omens, but their restlessness is emblematic of the album’s fraught recording process. In one of the album’s most harrowing moments, he closes the bleak, grief-stricken ballad “Girl in Amber” by repeating the words, “Don’t touch me,” as if a consoling hug would only exacerbate the pain. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done. This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle.

It isn’t so much about the finality of death as the ambiguity of the afterlife: Cave’s orator welcomes a litany of souls into purgatory, but his stern proclamation-“With my voice, I am calling you”-makes it unclear whether they’ll be redeemed in heaven or damned to hell. The song was among the first Cave wrote for the record, yet its opening image-“You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur”-feels unbearably prescient. But on the opening “Jesus Alone,” he’s wading deeper into the chop, the safety of the shoreline fading further out of view as he gets swept up by pattering drum drifts, humming organs, and swelling orchestration. The skies, seas, and mermaids that previously dominated Cave’s thoughts are still very much present here.

But where that record rallied for show-stopping epics like “Jubilee Street” and “Higgs Boson Blues,” Skeleton Tree’s drones and jitters offer no such moments of release. If you try to listen to Skeleton Tree removed from its somber context, the album feels very much like a natural step from 2013’s Push the Sky Away, whose premium on disquieting, ambient textures and wandering-mind lyricism now seems like less like a momentary detour than the gateway into an intriguing new phase for the Bad Seeds. It’s almost as if by thrusting himself into the spotlight during his darkest hour, Cave was issuing a form of karmic payback, penance for the pain and reckoning he’s inflicted on so many characters in his songs. As if to reinforce Skeleton Tree’s therapeutic quality, the notoriously taciturn Cave opened the studio door to director Andrew Dominik, who documented the album’s completion-in 3D, no less-for the companion film One More Time With Feeling. And though the songs are not explicitly about Arthur they are uncannily about coming to terms with loss and the realization that things will never be the same again. This is a record that exists in the headspace and guts of someone who’s endured an unspeakable, inconsolable trauma. The writing and recording of Skeleton Tree had commenced before the tragic incident, but the album was completed in its aftermath, and its specter hangs over it like a black fog. In July 2015, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur-one of his twin sons with wife Susie Bick-died when he accidentally fell from a cliff near the family’s current home in Brighton, England.

But despite amassing a songbook that needs its own morgue, on their 16th album together, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds must contend with something that is not so easily depicted: the sound of mourning.

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